Petshark: Talking Stick

Entries with the tag: funk

Sluggish. Disorganized. Inexplicable. Those are just a few of the words that come to mind about last night’s game, and by association the other seven losses in the last ten games. It makes me want to ask the Sharks “are you done? Do you feel better now?” You know, the way you ask a hysterical person if they have done all the shrieking and unintelligible ranting they need to do.

Because there is no rational explanation or excuse for the degree of ineptitude displayed lately by this team. Even McLellan’s absence does not explain it, because he has only been out for the last three games. The lack of preparedness and execution we’re seeing now has been there for a while, it’s just gotten worse.

Douglas Murray called it a funk. So I looked that word up. I know what it means, but sometimes there’s more to a word than you realize. In Middle English, it meant “spark, touchwood, or tinder.” By the time Modern English came around, “funk” had changed: “a verb meaning “to panic, fail due to panic”. Perhaps from ... obsolete Flemish fonck (“distress, agitation”), from Middle Dutch fonck (“perturbation, agitation”).” This is what happens when no one uses the dictionary: we can’t even tell the difference between a useful spark and panic-induced failure.